An Interview with Corey Minyard

Our series of unexpurgated interviews with Linux kernel pioneers continues with this e-conversation with Corey Minyard.

Welcome to the unexpurgated version of
Linux Journal's Linux Kernel Who's Who. If you
haven't yet seen our June 2000 issue, which features 40 profiles of
some of the kernel's pioneers (hackers like Alan Cox, Lars
Wirzenius, Jon Tombs and, of course, Linus Torvalds), make sure you
get a copy from your nearest newsstand--or your nearest Linux
Journal website. If you have already read the profiles, our
unexpurgated versions of the original interviews, e-mailed to each
major contributor to the Linux kernel, may reveal a few surprises,
and a lot more detail.

We'll be posting the original interviews here on the
Linux Journal website over the next several
weeks. So sit back and enjoy a few words from some of the folks who
helped make Linux possible!

--David Penn

An Interview with Corey Minyard

Linux Journal:How
did you first learn about Linux? What were you doing in your own
life at the time? (age, student, occupation, etc.)

Corey Minyard: It's hard to
remember exactly where I learned about Linux. It had to be on
Usenet someplace. I downloaded 0.11. I was working as a
hardware/software designer at the time and we had just obtained
Internet access recently. The timing was right.

LJ:What attracted
you to it, compared to FreeBSD, proprietary UNIX systems, or
lucrative areas such as Windows? What made you want to help with
development?

Corey:It had to be Linus'
attitude. He had the right attitude to make it succeed. I knew it
would be big from the beginning. I helped because when things don't
work right, well, it annoys me. Plus, everything else cost too much
or was lousy. Except for FreeBSD, which I didn't know existed. I'm
not sure it even did exist at that point in time.

LJ:What part of
Linux were you personally interested in and working on? Are you
still involved with Linux development? If so,
how?

Corey: I sent various small
patches in at the beginning. I wrote the CDU31A proprietary CDROM
driver (which, amazingly, some people still use, even though the
driver doesn't work very well any more due to kernel changes and my
inability to support it). I did a lot of work in the 0.98/0.99 days
on the TCP stacks finding race conditions and submitting patches. I
am currently doing some work on the PowerPC code; I did a major
restructure to make adding new platforms easier and I did a port to
the Force Powercore board. I'm doing lots of little things for
work.

LJ:What was most
important to you about Linux? What's the very best thing about
Linux?

Corey: It is the attitude of
the developers. The culture. As I said before, Linus' attitude was
good. It rubbed off. Linux people don't bicker among themselves
much. We work together. We overlook people's faults. Reporting bugs
is not an offense against someone, it is help. Personal
glorification is not important. Writing good code is.

LJ:How important
was the GNU project and how did the GNU Hurd factor into your
thinking? Should Linux be properly known as
GNU/Linux?

Corey: Without GNU, Linux
would not have happened. No way. The eventual goal of GNU was to
produce a Unix-like OS. With that goal, they enabled Linux to
happen. If they had not been shooting for Hurd, just developing
tools, compiler and platform choices might have been different and
Linux might not have happened. As far as the name, that kind of
gets back to the personal glorification thing. But I don't really
care.

LJ:What was it
like to be working with others over the Internet at a time when
several computer luminaries thought that organizing successful
software development over the net was difficult if not impossible?
Did you realize how revolutionary this approach
was?

Corey: It didn't really
occur to me that this was happening. I was just doing my little
part. I'm not sure it really occurred to anyone.

LJ: What are you
doing with your life now? (occupation, family, etc.) What's a
typical day like in your life? How do you find time for work and
Linux, and how do you balance free software with the need to make a
living (or the need to become rich)? What do you do for
fun?

Corey: I'm an system
architect at a major communications equipment supplier. I have a
wife and two young kids. Most of my days are made up of work,
playing with kids, reading email, and writing a little code. I play
guitar at my church's youth group some days.

I don't get to do as much with Linux as I did before kids,
although I get to use it at work. Being an architect means I spend
a lot more time telling other people what to do and a lot less time
doing stuff myself, though. I have no great desire to be rich. If I
become rich, so be it, but that would mean more responsibility for
me to handle it properly.

LJ:Who do you
think other than Linus has had the most influence over the Linux
community, and why?

Corey: It's hard to say.
Probably Alan Cox. But the nice thing is that people work together
and good ideas from anybody are not generally ignored.

LJ:What do you
think is the most important addition or change that is needed by
Linux in order for it to succeed further? In what direction does
Linux development need to go? Where is Linux's future the
brightest? What is the #1 biggest threat to Linux
today?

Corey: For it to work well
on the desktop it needs a good application support. Beyond that
it's tracking the current state-of-the-art in the hardware. Linux
is primed and ready to take over the embedded computer market right
now; it has a big future there no matter what happens on the
desktop.

The biggest threat to Linux is a change in attitude. It could
survive almost anything else (well, an asteroid destroying all life
on earth might cause some problems), but the attitudes of sharing,
mutual respect, and working together need to remain for Linux to
continue to be what it is.

LJ:How do you feel
about Linux's current popularity? Would you have preferred it
stayed contained in the hacker community? Would it have survived on
the fringes?

Corey: When the Internet
finally started getting popular outside the computer community, I
used to tell my wife, "Get these people that want to talk about
macrame off my network!" But in the end, getting the world involved
has generally been a good thing for the Internet. The same for
Linux. Without the popularity it might have survived like Minix
survived, but it wouldn't be what it is now.

LJ:Would it have
survived without the IPOs and financial backing? What impact has
the commercialization of Linux had? How do you feel about Linux
profiteering and the people who make millions off of other people's
volunteered efforts?

Corey: It's hard to say what
would have happened. Money makes a lot of things possible. It's
probably a good thing in general as long as the attitude doesn't
change. The people who are making the money are the ones that took
the risks. They deserve the rewards.

LJ:How can Linux
compete with MS in the desktop sector, and will we be able to hold
the commercial sector if we don't take the desktop as well? Can we
take the desktop without ruining the spirit of Linux by dumbing it
down? Where will be our next areas of growth and
expansion?

Corey: Linux can certainly
compete with MS if it has good desktop applications. It's just as
easy to install now and it's pretty easy to maintain. Much easier
to maintain in a corporate world. I think it can become a corporate
desktop without any dumbing down. For the average home user it's
hard to say, but most of them are unable to install or maintain
Windows either. Growth and expansion next? I said it before: the
embedded computer world. I'm waiting to see Linux in a toaster
:-).

LJ:How do you feel
about commercial applications being written for Linux, and
proprietary software and protocols in general? Do you run Linux
more for philosophical reasons or practical reasons? If something
that appeared to be better came along, would people jump ship?
Conversely, would we stay with Linux even if it somehow
degenerated, took a wrong turn, or stopped
progressing?

Corey: I run Linux for
practical reasons. I'm generally a philosophical person, but Linux
is a nice combination of philosophical and practical. Proprietary
software annoys me; I can't fix the bugs I find. I'll always choose
open source if I have a good option there. Proprietary protocols
are really annoying because they limit their use and the tend to be
very bad, but they generally don't survive in the long run.

If something better came along or things went sour, sure I'd
jump. But to be better it would have to be open source and have
that attitude I keep mentioning. It's hard to imagine something
better coming along now, but you never know.

LJ:Do you think
the community should support only open source/free software? How
would the community survive hard times if there were a lag or
downtime in the continuing success of the open source methodology?
Is the free software philosophy strong enough and with enough
adherents to pull us through?

Corey: Depends on what you
mean by support. Should open source be the backbone of what Linux
is? Certainly so. Should we allow proprietary software to be run on
Linux? Certainly so. Should we encourage it? Not generally.

Could we survive a short-term failure of open source? For a
short time, yes. A long term failure would mean that we were all
wrong and it won't work. That may be the case, but it looks pretty
good now. And as long as hackers exist there will be adherents to
pull it through.

LJ:How do you feel
about the different licenses? GPL, LGPL, QPL,
etc?

Corey: Licensing is actually
an issue I deal with at work. It ranks down there with writing
status reports in my list of favorite things to do. But licensing
is important. I think the Linux community has done a good job with
licensing. GPL and LGPL each have their place. As far as all the
other licenses, it seems a bit excessive to have so many, but as
long as the terms are good I don't mind.

LJ:Is there a
world outside of computers? Are you ever afraid that you'll wake up
one day and feel you wasted your life in front of a
computer?

Corey: Of course a world
exists outside of computers. They shouldn't be our raison d'etre. I
worship in church, take my children to the zoo, spend time with my
wife, and do a host of other important things. If I had to choose
between computers and those things, computers would lose.
Thankfully I don't have to choose. I try to spend my time in front
of a computer helping others or learning. Those things are not a
waste of time.

LJ:Thank you very
much! Anything else you'd like to add?

Corey:I'd like to thank all
the people that made Linux possible and brought it to where it is
today. It has certainly made my life a lot more interesting and
fun.

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